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THE LAST WORD; Authentically Offensive

I was happily reading ''Hell at the Breech,'' Tom Franklin's suspenseful new novel, based on actual events, about a bush war in Alabama in the 1890's, when something about it began to feel a bit off. There are people who find historical fiction unbearably affected, but not me -- not, at least, as long as the author avoids sinning outrageously against verisimilitude. ''Hell at the Breech,'' which is told from the points of view of a handful of characters in language meant to sound more or less like their own, sounds a few wrong notes, but none glaring enough to ruin this otherwise tough, smart, niftily plotted tale. It wasn't the presence of an objectionable word or expression that kept tripping me up. It was the absence of a word, or, to be more precise, the highly selective presence of a particular, very objectionable word, a word many Americans consider to be the worst in the English language.

''Hell at the Breech'' takes place in a fog of moral ambiguity -- it's got the trappings of a western and the worldview of a film noir -- and the closest thing it has to a hero is Billy Waite, the county sheriff. You know the drill: Waite has plenty of flaws, and because he lives in an imperfect world he occasionally finds himself forced to act unjustly in order to uphold the law or to do something illegal for the sake of keeping the peace. As the uneasy little society of Mitcham Beat, Ala., degenerates into violence and chaos, though, he remains the novel's center of reason and decency.

But Waite is also a veteran of the Confederate Army and the product of rural 19th-century Alabama. However good a man he may be, it's hard to believe that he's made it to his 60's relatively free of the racial prejudices of his time and place. Specifically, it's striking that he never uses the ''N'' word. And neither does the novel's other main character, Macky, a poor backwoods orphan who gets mixed up with the Hell-at-the-Breech bushwhacking gang. For these two people, African-Americans are usually ''black'' and very occasionally ''colored.''

It's not that the ''N'' word never appears in ''Hell at the Breech,'' it's that it shows up only in the mouths and minds of the novel's most reprehensible characters: killers, snooty townsfolk and bandits. Randall Kennedy, the author of ''Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,'' says that while unlikely, it's ''not wholly implausible'' that someone like Waite might make a point of avoiding the word, which was associated with the lower classes. Macky is another matter, and the fact that only the bad guys in ''Hell at the Breech'' use the word at all seems artificial. ''That demarcation is where readers might get the feeling they're being manipulated,'' Kennedy told me in a telephone interview. ''It's a real dilemma. If you have your hero using the word, you risk alienating or confusing the readers.''

Franklin's choice is understandable; ''Hell at the Breech'' is about a bloody class war among the whites of Mitcham Beat and not about race (the bushwhackers have scared most of the blacks out of the area). If the author has Waite talking and thinking about African-Americans the way the real county sheriff probably did during the Mitcham war, many contemporary readers would recoil. If he doesn't, sticklers like me accuse him of inauthenticity. Either way, it's a distraction from the story he's trying to tell.

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History, it turns out, can be the historical novelist's worst enemy. Some, adopting the policy that the best defense is a good offense, strike first, felling history with a body blow before it gets the chance to cause any real trouble. It would take a reader with a much higher hooey threshold than mine to get very far into Sena Jeter Naslund's ''Ahab's Wife,'' in which the titular heroine is born into an antebellum household in rural Kentucky equipped with a complete set of the racial, sexual and religious attitudes of a contemporary subscriber to The Utne Reader. The implication is that the past was full of right-thinking people -- people just like ourselves if we happen to be late-20th-century liberals of secular or slightly New Agey temperament -- we just never hear about them.

When it comes to race and American history, this sanitizing approach has troubling implications; it erases the reality that even essentially good people can harbor profoundly wrong beliefs. The best historical novels attack that paradox head on. The dirt-poor white hero of Richard Slotkin's wonderful 2000 novel, ''Abe,'' uses the ''N'' word and bridles when he thinks he's being treated as somehow equivalent to a ''Negro,'' but then readers are inclined to cut this fellow some slack: he's the young Abraham Lincoln. Besides, the purpose of ''Abe'' is to trace the gradual reconstruction of Lincoln's racial and moral thinking as he sloughs off the prejudices of his childhood; the process is long and complicated. In Brian Hall's ''I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company,'' published earlier this year, the primary white characters -- the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark -- are mired in sexual, familial and political confusions that combine with their mixed-up notions about American Indians and blacks to mark them distinctly as products of their time. And very rarely a writer dares to build a novel around a character who embraces the evils of her historical context. The toxic belle who narrates Valerie Martin's ''Property'' (also published this year) belies the convention that suffering ennobles the oppressed; she's so soured by her own crushing marriage that she can find solace only in tormenting her slaves.

Franklin, to be fair, has smaller fish to fry, and ''Hell at the Breech'' works so well as a doomy police story that it's easier to forgive its lapses than those of more ambitious historical novels like ''Ahab's Wife.'' But especially when it comes to issues like race, fudging the past can be an injury to the future. Historically accurate characters may be harder for some readers to relate to, but when novelists try to sell us contemporary values dressed up in period costumes, they imply that the ''good'' people of any era never have to reconsider their basic beliefs. That keeps us from recognizing how far we've come. And it can keep us from seeing that we still have a way to go.